Liturgists and People Who Know What They Are Talking About have worked very hard to persuade people that we should be trying dissuade people from talking about Christenings and instead talk about the sacrament of baptism. Today the Church of England appears to have let the cat out of the bag with a post that seems to suggest that no-one, least of all anyone in the Church of England’s press team has been paying the blindest bit of notice.
The post, Top 10 facts about Christenings is being comprehensively panned and rubbished on twitter by friends I know in the Church of England.
The post itself reminds me of a conversation that I had only yesterday with an American friend when I realised that what we think about baptism differs radically in different parts of the world. Like marriage, we believe baptism to be a universal thing commonly understood. And then you look at the formularies for the services or chat to someone about it and you realise that we are not always talking about the same thing.
During my trip to North America last year, I was more concious than ever that the churches over there have bought into a baptismal theology that we just don’t talk about. It is based around something called the baptismal covenant – a little catechism that is used at baptisms.
Now, we use the words here too. People will recognise them as being part of the service of baptism.
Here’s one form of it:
Do you believe in God the Creator, who made the world?
I believe.
Do you believe in God the Saviour, who redeemed humanity?
I believe.
Do you believe in God the Sanctifier, who gives life to God’s people?
I believe.
This is the faith of the Church.
This is our faith. We believe in one God, Creator, Saviour and Sanctifier.
AmenNN., as those who will love and care for N., will you continue in the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers?
With the help of God, I will
Will you proclaim the good news by word and deed, serving Christ in all people?
With the help of God, I will.
Will you work for justice and peace, honouring God in all Creation?
With the help of God, I will.This is the task of the Church.
This is our task: to live and work for the kingdom of God.
Now the point is, this isn’t called The Baptismal Covenant in Scotland. And in England, so far as I can get my head around the liturgy, it is entirely optional and even then only for those who have been baptised who can answer for themselves, not for babies.
Yet, my friends in the US and Canada speak about the Baptismal Covenant as though it is universally understood, always used at baptisms and as though it justifies all kinds of things.
For a lot of people over there, the questions about gay relationships, ordaining women as bishops and priests and all kinds of other issues about justice are simply answered with a shrug of the shoulders and “well, we need to do these things because of the baptismal covenant”.
I don’t think that I do well in explaining to friends from across the pond that though we may (or indeed may not) use the same words at baptisms, we don’t generally carry those ideas through into thinking that they are slam dunk answers to difficult questions that arise in other areas of church life. Indeed, they look at me as though I am bonkers. I don’t know anyone in the UK who would seriously argue in public that same-sex marriage or the ordination of women are obviously things that we should do because of anything to do with baptism yet that association is commonplace in other parts of the Anglican Communion.
I may be bonkers, of course. But I think I’m right to say that the north American churches believe that there is something going on at baptism that I think most Christians in the UK Anglican churches and indeed most Christians in all of the rest of Christendom through all the ages of the church would be bewildered and puzzled by.
I’m puzzled by it too. Though there is nothing in the Baptismal Covenant that I disagree with, it isn’t a set of promises that were either made on my behalf as a child nor was I asked to assert any of it when I was baptised.
When you travel, you discover that some things are universal. When you travel well, you realise that they are not the things that you expected to be universal.
Thoughts?
I used to try to point this out to people when I still lived in the States, to no avail (I think there’s probably something about it in my archives). While I don’t necessarily dissent from their understanding of baptism, or marriage, or justice, or whatever, I found it impossible to induce many of my co-Episcopalians that “the Baptismal Covenant” isn’t in itself a warrant when speaking to others. At best, it’s the beginning of a discussion; at worst, it’s a conversation-stopper that conveys a certain ecclesial solipsism.
If (and it’s a big if) I understand the American position correctly, it is based on all of us being received thought baptism into the Christian faith on equal terms. To block women and gay people from equal participation in the church at all levels therefore goes against the terms of the baptismal reception into our faith.
that was meant to be “through” baptism!
Sorry — “induce many of my co-Episcopalians to realise that…”
yes, ok, but it is certainly there in the NT. Baptism and Eucharist are revolutionary acts from that perspective. Perhaps we should say that if both baptism and Eucharist are what we understand them to be then we must do these things. And AKMA I remember (I was at St Lukes Evanston years ago) that you are a bit more conservative about these things. But the fact that Episcopalians have come to a generally accepted view of this that isn’t found in the UK isn’t much of an argument at all, is it? Or had I forgotten somewhere that to be true a doctrine or belief must be accepted and held somewhere in the British Isles?
I think the issue is more that Americans tend to think that everyone believes stuff that everyone doesn’t. It isn’t that because the Brits don’t do it, it doesn’t have value.
Can you connect LGBT issues with baptism from a biblical point of view, Dennis?
Or connect ordaining women to the Episcopate with baptism in the Bible?
Or justice issues?
What is it that is there in the NT that makes baptism revolutionary.
I think that I might understand this if we were talking about the baptism of John the Baptist with all his stuff about vipers. However, I don’t remember hearing that passage read at many baptisms.
You know I am not a theologian. But perhaps the important difference lies somewhere in the understanding of the church and the understanding of the goals and purposes. Once justice is seen as part of the Kingdom of God and the church as a community to bring this about how do we not work to bring that about? Remember also that the Baptismal Covenant is not only said at every baptism but is also said by the congregation at the Easter Vigil, at ordinations, and some congregations use it during the entire season of Easter. We hear it quite often. It is used often and during important times here.
You know, it may not be the Baptismal Covenant that divides us. Perhaps the cultural difference here has a lot to do with the role of the Episcopal Church as a community that people convert to as an escape from more conservative churches here in the US. I don’t think many Anglicans elsewhere understand this. Perhaps the sources of the differences on our side are because when many of us in ECUSA hear Anglicans in the UK sounding like the right wing churches of our childhood (that many of us escaped from) it feels like a betrayal. We don’t get that other Anglican churches don’t stand in as shelters from a childhood in cruel conservative churches. I think that is a bigger source of our differences. We have few conservatives because people escape from conservative churches (with all of the emotional baggage of refugees) to become an Episcopalian in the US.
And what is funny is that I think I recall hearing John the Baptist stuff read at a lot of baptisms, especially adult baptisms.
Yep. I realized this all about half a minute after we came back to the United States. The Baptismal covenant is used to justify only offering communion to the baptized for one. I think it dove-tails wonderfully with all that exclusive and ‘aren’t we better’ church stuff from Stanley H.
I’ve wondered if the whole baptismal covenant thing might be a reaction to membership in the Episcopal church in the U.S. having functioned a status symbol in the earlier half of this century.
I think that a misunderstanding exists here as to what we North Am Anglicans view as the Baptismal Covenant. It isn’t a liturgy or sacremantal ritual that you can point to in our prayer books, magic words or an incantation, and acknowledge that the five Anglican churches on the North Am continent use during baptism, the covenant is that intangible aspect that we acknowledge occurs between the candidate and God when one answers a call of conscious understanding to be baptized or one’s parents bring one as a child. We believe that we all, you folks the world over and ourselves, who are baptised Christians have entered the covenant, regardless of what expression of the church of God administers your baptism; Roman, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc. We acknowledge, as baptized, and so having entered the covenant, anyone who has received the intentional rite with water for salvation in the name of the trinity. (I think that most churches would have to inquire about the intention of the rite, as many Baptist traditions only baptise to bring one into membership in the church.)
It follows hand in hand with the concept that baptism is something that happens but once and that any baptism that occurs again is conditional upon the person not having already been baptised.
I’m talking about the Baptismal Covenant that you certainly can point towards on, for example, page 303 of my copy of the US Book of Common Prayer. That’s what US and Canadians point me towards when they make their claims about the Baptismal Covenant. “That”, they say, “is the Baptismal Covenant and it means …..”
I don’t know nearly enough about the Mexican church and don’t know if the same text is in the liturgies there.
The Mexican church, as also are the two Anglican churches in Central America, is the daughter of the US church. We were most of us once Latin American dioceses of the US church and became independent national and regional churches. We in Mexico became an autonomous church in 1995. We use the official Spanish translation of the US prayerbook.
But I think it a misunderstanding that folks from our churches point you to the baptismal service in the prayer book as the actual covenant. The covenant is intangible. I don’t think that anyone here would try to make the case that anyone in another Anglican church doesn’t partake in the baptismal covenant because their baptismal service was different or because they were a Christian through another tradition with a more simple baptismal service. It is the fact of having been baptized, not the words used in the service.
The covenant relates to the ministry of all the baptized as in the words of Paul, that as many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ, that is the covenant. That as members of the Body of Christ we are no longer male or female, slave or freeman, Scotsman or Mexican, gay, straight, bisexual or transgendered. We are all equal Christians having put on Christ and therefore cannot be denied any aspect of membership/ministry in the commonwealth of God.
Yes, I understand that is what people mean by it. My point really is that few here will understand those consequences to stem from anything to do with baptism.
I have strong hesitations about the idea of entering into a covenant that one has not consented to. I suppose one could make an argument in favour of seeing baptismal covenant theology as stemming from circumcision but that is a bit icky and not terribly good theology for women.
And, cruicially, I think we are equal because we are made in the image of God, not because we’ve been baptised. Baptism makes no person more equal nor more dignified in God’s eyes than the person was the day before they were baptised.
“Baptism makes no person more equal nor more dignified in God’s eyes than the person was the day before they were baptized.”
That isn’t the point. The point should be that those human distinctions should fall away with one another. In spite of the culture perhaps differentiating, Paul posits that among Christians those distinctions no longer exist.
Well, we are back to square one. I believe people are inherrently equal. I don’t think that has anything to do with whether someone is baptised and it doesn’t depend and isn’t enriched by any theology of baptism I’ve ever encountered.
There’s no reply button after your last comment to Dah-veed, Kelvin, so I’m using this space.
Isn’t the point that, while everyone is equal, baptism is a kind of membership ticket for Christianity? We are not arguing whether non-Christian women and gay people should be priests and bishops. So being created equal and then baptised as equal into the Christian faith and into one particular denomination, all office of that church should be open to all.
Well, to repeat myself, I think that all offices of the church should be open to everyone because everyone is created equal that is what is right.
I don’t think it has anything to do with being baptised.
I wasn’t baptised into any denomination. (I wasn’t baptised as an Anglican either). I’m pretty sure I was part of the church before I was baptised too. It wasn’t ever a membership ticket for me.
Though I think that for practical reasons churches need some sense of who their members are, I kind of think I’m in cahoots with a God who tore up the requirements for membership of the Christian Faith.
You would not say that some kind of formal commitment to Christianity should be needed to be a priest or a bishop?
I could almost go along with that – but I don’t think that could form part of the theology of any church right now. The argument for equality has to be made from within the Christian faith, and Baptism isn’t a bad place to start.
Of course I would require some kind of formal commitment before someone should be a priest or a bishop. That is what ordination precisely is.
I think Christianity (historically and biblically) is a terribly poor place to start talking about everyone being equal.
I don’t believe that everyone is equal because I am a Christian. I believe everyone is equal anyway. That belief has consequences for how I live out my Christianity.
Yes, that’s fair enough. But aren’t we talking about Americans arguing that all offices of the church should be open to all baptised people? We’re not talking about equality in a general sense, or that we should treat everyone as our equal.
We are talking about a theological criterion for arguing that women and partnered gay people should not be barred from any office in the church.
It’s a specific answer to a specific question.
What I was saying is that American and Canadian Anglicans (or maybe their clergy and seminary types and activists) talk about equality by appealing to something to do with baptism which they think is universally held and universally true. My argument is that this isn’t believed or understood by many people over here. It is one of the things that causes misunderstandings between Anglicans and is based on a theology that is neither necessary, particularly biblical nor universally held even by all Anglicans, never mind the church catholic.
My argument remains that women and men should be equally eligable for ordination, just as partnered gay people should be if partnered straight people are but that this is for reasons other than that people who are ordained have all to be baptised.
“I wasn’t baptised into any denomination. (I wasn’t baptised as an Anglican either). I’m pretty sure I was part of the church before I was baptised too. It wasn’t ever a membership ticket for me.
Though I think that for practical reasons churches need some sense of who their members are, I kind of think I’m in cahoots with a God who tore up the requirements for membership of the Christian Faith.”
Then I am not sure that anyone in any other Anglican church has much in common with you Kelvin. With that statement you just tossed out the entire first few centuries of the primitive Christian church where there is no evidence anyone subscribed to your very ultra modern theology of human equality and “olly, olly, oxen free,” but to the contrary, a very serious developmental evolution of a sacramental understanding of baptism and who was a baptized Christian and so admitted to the sacramental communal meal and who was a catechumen and moving toward baptism and entrance to the commonweal of God.
Baptism seems to me to be about following Jesus and doing what he asked us to do.
Many sacramental acts work as initation for people into life with God.
All those people being baptised in the early centuries managed to be baptised without anyone proclaiming a Baptismal Covenant, they were baptised in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit into the life (and death) of Christ. The new association of lay ministry and justification for the ordination of women and people in same-sex relationships seems to me to be the rather novel development.
Yes to the first part of your comment. Americans do not realise that their line of argument is not easily understood in other parts of the Anglican Communion because we do not have our conversations in the same way.
But there is no one killer argument. And what convinces some people will leave others completely untouched. Our arguments and ways of looking at questions arise out of our local circumstances and out of the conversations that surround us. I would therefore not say that the TEC view is wrong, only that it is different and that it does not seem to be THE killer argument to us that it seems to be to the church there.
I think Melissa is onto something though when she connects it with the Stanley Hauerwas stuff about creating a moral community distinctive from the naughty world.
I don’t buy that and am suspicious of the baptismal covenant theology because it seems to me to be made out of the same stuff.
I’m interested in Melissa’s suggestion that this is a way of replacing exclusive membership cachets of the past. I’d throw in that I have a suspicion that it is a subconcious response to the North American churches’ issues with race and land. I was amazed at the lack of racial integration I found over there in places I would have expected to find it. Not everywhere, of course but far more than I was comfortable with.
We have different issues about race here which are just as serious. However, they are not quite so focussed on slavery and land grabs. (They are about other bad things instead).
I may be bonkers – probably – but as I understand it I was baptised into ‘The Body of Christ’ in The Church of Ireland in 1945. I don’t need any other Covenant to realise that any baptised Christian who does not accept the full inclusion of women and LGTB persons will continue to trouble my sanity and every other aspect of life in all it’s fullness. Ooh Yikes! -I had two Godfathers and one Godmother.(Two of child’s sex recommended by CofE?) One of my Godfathers was in all likelihood Gay – poor chap went bonkers. I expect he is a good prayerful influence now that he IS what he was called to be a fully joined up member of The Kingdom of Heaven.
No one in North American Anglicanism is talking about “another” covenant. The covenant is baptism.
If I might move away from the ‘baptismal covenant’ debate and back to the opening section of Kelvin’s post, I think ‘baptism’ and ‘christening’ are like ‘Pentecost’ and ‘Whitsun’. The Greek-based word is in common use amongst Liturgists and People Who Know What They Are Talking About; but the English word has a ring of the folk religion of the rural parish which I find rather appealing. I use ‘baptise’ when I speak in a churchy context (though not Pentecost, since I find Whit Sunday in the Book of Common Prayer and I prefer to avoid confusion with the Jewish festival); but I should never presume to tell anyone who speaks of ‘christening’ that they are wrong. Furthermore I deprecate the decline in the expression ‘Christian name’ (=’christened name’), which was common not long ago when I was younger. (‘Not long ago’ means ‘after 1960’.)
That is, in fact, the only grouse I have with the ‘ Top 10 facts about Christenings’. At point 4, ‘Does a christening give my baby a name?’ the website responds ‘No. Your baby’s name is given when you register the birth.’ They need to read section 13 of the Registration of Births and Deaths Act again. It is perfectly possible to register a birth with no name, for the name to be given in baptism within a year and then for it to be entered on the register on a certificate from the officiating minister. (Kelvin, compare Registration of Births Deaths and Marriages (Scotland) Act 1965, s.43(3).)
But that apart, what is wrong with the ‘Top 10 Facts’? I hold no brief for Church House Westminster, but I see this as a well-meant and generally harmless attempt at outreach.
“Baptism seems to me to be about following Jesus and doing what he asked us to do.
All those people being baptised in the early centuries managed to be baptised without anyone proclaiming a Baptismal Covenant, they were baptised in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit into the life (and death) of Christ.”
And I would submit that being baptized is about more than Jesus wanting folks to get wet! Immersion in water coupled with a concept that something intangible was occurring is much older than John at the Jordan. Submersing baths had been available in Judaism in private homes and synagogues for centuries. Referring to that intangible aspect of the act as a baptismal covenant may be fresh, but the Church has held the theology from the beginning.
“Many sacramental acts work as initation for people into life with God.”
Sorry, I don’t agree. The Church’s one sacramental act of initiation has always been baptism. This new universalism is creeping in today with folks like you promoting it. Communion without baptism is another facet of it.
“The new association of lay ministry and justification for the ordination of women and people in same-sex relationships seems to me to be the rather novel development.”
There isn’t anything new about it, it is but a recent pointing to what has been in the teachings of the Church from the Pauline corpus all along.
Hello, Kelvin! I’ve been enjoying your blog sense we met during your trip to North America last year. We met in Sewanee.
I agree with much of what you say about the use of the Baptismal Covenant as a blunt instrument on all kinds of ecclesial and theological issues. It is used to make arguments for just about everything. The sad thing is, it keeps anyone from doing much harder theological work on important aspects of our life together. However, I’m curious what you mean when you say, “I think I’m right to say that the north American churches believe that there is something going on at baptism that I think most Christians in the UK Anglican churches and indeed most Christians in all of the rest of Christendom through all the ages of the church would be bewildered and puzzled by.”
Could you clarify a bit?
Hi Quinn – yes. I think its fairly simple. I think that there is a move in the US, for example, to associate what is happening at baptism with ecclesiology – what it means to be the church. I think that the tradition is to associate baptism with the life and death of Jesus, and yes, for many to think of it as an initiation rite for the church. The theological novelty is to say that because of baptism or particularly the Baptismal Covenant then there are particular consequences that affect how we view ministry. I don’t particularly think that baptism is a sacrament which is fundamentally related to ministry. Many in Anglicanism profess to do so, some on this side of the Atlantic, particularly those searching for an affirmation of patterns of ministry and service of the whole people of God. It is the connection between baptism and ministry which I think is novel and which I think is far from universally held to be true.
By the way, congratulations on your recent ordination.
“I don’t particularly think that baptism is a sacrament which is fundamentally related to ministry.
It is the connection between baptism and ministry which I think is novel and which I think is far from universally held to be true.”
I can’t imagine how baptism isn’t related to ministry. Baptism is the door to the Church. Everything that we do begins at baptism.
That is my point. Those whose faith has been formed within this Baptismal Covenant stuff really can’t imagine that baptism could mean anything other than the novel things that they say it means.
And even then, this is really about balance. My problem is not really about connecting baptism and ministry my problem is about thinking that that is primarily what baptism is about rather than an incidental consequence of what it is about.
Kelvin, I have a 4 year Master of Theology degree, I did the first 2 years at a United Methodist seminary, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX and the final two years at an ecumenical seminary, Northwest Theological Union, Seattle, WA. And I have further taken post graduate courses at Vancouver School of Theology, Vancouver, BC, Canada, so if I was formed in this stuff, then it permeates all of Christendom in North America.
Yes. I’m sure it does. It is part of the seminary culture in the USA.
It seems to me to be obvious that if so much effort has to go into teaching it is obviously not a view generally held by members of the church.
It is to be found in other places too, for example, the relatively recent Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, but only a few lines in an exhaustive attempt to say what baptism is about – Sections 1268-1270. (The baptism section has over seventy sections). Here again though, it is a novelty coming out of the People of God theologies arising from Vatican II. Before that, non-existant. Check the Penny Catechism, the faith that so many Roman friends were actually taught – nothing remotely like it there.